consultant’s badge from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.” He pondered this, then unzipped the side pocket I was pointing toward. He fished out the papers and the leather wallet that held my TBI shield.
“So you’re Dr. William Brockton, PhD?” It was clear, from the incisive questioning, why this one was in charge.
“I am. I teach anthropology at the University of Tennessee. When I’m not causing trouble for the TSA.”
The joke seemed to cut some of the tension. “Tennessee,” mused the midlevel guy. “What kind of football team is Tennessee gonna have this year?”
“Probably pretty good. But probably not as good as Florida’s.”
“Probably not,” agreed the big boss. He gave me a smile that combined smugness, superiority, and pity. And in the pitying part of that smile, I saw that after enduring a few more barbs about football, the loser unlucky enough to live in Tennessee would make his flight after all.
T he rusty venetian blinds in the windows of the bone lab were shut—at least, as shut as their fraying cords and tattered tapes allowed them to be—but the morning sun still poured through gaps where slats had been broken or bent during the past forty years. On hot mornings, even early in May, the stadium’s steel girders and masonry foundations worked together like an immense solar oven, collecting the sun’s heat and radiating it through the south-facing wall of windows in the bone lab. During pleasant months of the year, the bank of tables lining those windows offered plenty of daylight for studying bones, but during summer and winter, the extremes of heat and cold along the expanse of glass tended to drive students as far away from the windows as possible.
Miranda Lovelady was putting bones—the bones of the golf-club victim, I noticed—in a long cardboard box as I entered the lab. The box was three feet in length, with a one-foot-square cross section. We had thousands of such boxes stacked on shelves beneath the stands of the stadium. Each box contained the bones of a human skeleton, cleaned and neatly arranged. Several thousand of the skeletons were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Native American skeletons from the Great Plains, which I’d excavated decades before, early in my career. Another thousand were modern skeletons from bodies donated to the Body Farm over the past twenty years. And a few hundred contained the broken, burned, shot, or stabbed skeletal remains of murder victims.
A small, separate compartment at one end of each box held the skull—in the case of the box Miranda was repacking, the putter-punched skull—while the main compartment housed all other bones (and, in this box, the broken putter). The long bones of the legs and arms lay parallel, the ribs spooned up together, and the vertebrae clumped, strung together on cord like bony beads on a warrior’s necklace. As the door closed behind me, Miranda looked up and asked, “How was your weekend?” Then she looked down at the box in my hand and added, “Whatcha got?”
“Fine,” I answered. “And a skull from Florida.”
“Florida? Who sent you a skull from Florida?”
“Nobody. I went and got it.” Her eyebrows shot up in an interrogatory manner. “I made a quick trip to Tallahassee. Got there Thursday. Came back Friday night. Spent the weekend cleaning this.”
“Do tell.”
“Angie St. Claire—the forensic tech from the state crime lab—called Friday and asked me to help look into her sister’s death. That’s why Angie left here so suddenly on Wednesday.” Miranda nodded and opened her mouth to speak, but I didn’t give her a chance. “Anyhow, while I was down there for that, a sheriff’s deputy brought in this kid’s skull from one of the rural counties outside Tallahassee. I thought I’d ask Joanna to do a reconstruction.”
Miranda clearly wanted to ask more, but I excused myself to talk to Joanna, and Miranda left with the bone box, presumably to reshelve it in the
“So you’re Dr. William Brockton, PhD?” It was clear, from the incisive questioning, why this one was in charge.
“I am. I teach anthropology at the University of Tennessee. When I’m not causing trouble for the TSA.”
The joke seemed to cut some of the tension. “Tennessee,” mused the midlevel guy. “What kind of football team is Tennessee gonna have this year?”
“Probably pretty good. But probably not as good as Florida’s.”
“Probably not,” agreed the big boss. He gave me a smile that combined smugness, superiority, and pity. And in the pitying part of that smile, I saw that after enduring a few more barbs about football, the loser unlucky enough to live in Tennessee would make his flight after all.
T he rusty venetian blinds in the windows of the bone lab were shut—at least, as shut as their fraying cords and tattered tapes allowed them to be—but the morning sun still poured through gaps where slats had been broken or bent during the past forty years. On hot mornings, even early in May, the stadium’s steel girders and masonry foundations worked together like an immense solar oven, collecting the sun’s heat and radiating it through the south-facing wall of windows in the bone lab. During pleasant months of the year, the bank of tables lining those windows offered plenty of daylight for studying bones, but during summer and winter, the extremes of heat and cold along the expanse of glass tended to drive students as far away from the windows as possible.
Miranda Lovelady was putting bones—the bones of the golf-club victim, I noticed—in a long cardboard box as I entered the lab. The box was three feet in length, with a one-foot-square cross section. We had thousands of such boxes stacked on shelves beneath the stands of the stadium. Each box contained the bones of a human skeleton, cleaned and neatly arranged. Several thousand of the skeletons were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Native American skeletons from the Great Plains, which I’d excavated decades before, early in my career. Another thousand were modern skeletons from bodies donated to the Body Farm over the past twenty years. And a few hundred contained the broken, burned, shot, or stabbed skeletal remains of murder victims.
A small, separate compartment at one end of each box held the skull—in the case of the box Miranda was repacking, the putter-punched skull—while the main compartment housed all other bones (and, in this box, the broken putter). The long bones of the legs and arms lay parallel, the ribs spooned up together, and the vertebrae clumped, strung together on cord like bony beads on a warrior’s necklace. As the door closed behind me, Miranda looked up and asked, “How was your weekend?” Then she looked down at the box in my hand and added, “Whatcha got?”
“Fine,” I answered. “And a skull from Florida.”
“Florida? Who sent you a skull from Florida?”
“Nobody. I went and got it.” Her eyebrows shot up in an interrogatory manner. “I made a quick trip to Tallahassee. Got there Thursday. Came back Friday night. Spent the weekend cleaning this.”
“Do tell.”
“Angie St. Claire—the forensic tech from the state crime lab—called Friday and asked me to help look into her sister’s death. That’s why Angie left here so suddenly on Wednesday.” Miranda nodded and opened her mouth to speak, but I didn’t give her a chance. “Anyhow, while I was down there for that, a sheriff’s deputy brought in this kid’s skull from one of the rural counties outside Tallahassee. I thought I’d ask Joanna to do a reconstruction.”
Miranda clearly wanted to ask more, but I excused myself to talk to Joanna, and Miranda left with the bone box, presumably to reshelve it in the
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